Saturday, April 25, 2009

Tutorial: Monster Feet

This is a fun craft to do with an elementary age kid. The one thing only an adult can take care of is the final assemblage and cutting of the hole for the foot at the very end. I’ve shown a design done completely with paper, but you can feel free to embellish with markers or crayons as well. I highly recommend Crayola construction paper crayons- they are one of my favorite classroom art supplies. They don’t seem to be sold in conventional craft stores yet, but I found some here on Amazon. These come in the cutest colors that all look great together, and they stand out very brightly even on dark colored paper. Glitter crayons work pretty well, too.

For one pair of these, you will need:

4 paper grocery bags

Newspaper for stuffing

Scissors

Pencil

Glue- Elmer’s or school glue will do just fine

Construction paper

Crayons or markers, if desired

1. Begin to stuff two of the bags with newspaper.

2. Fill to the top of the bag.

3. Make the toes of your monster feet. I used human toes, but you can do lizard or dinosaur toes, bird claws, webbed feet, wacky shoes, you name it. Remember that we need two matching sets of everything, so it helps to fold the paper in half, or do two sheets at once.

4. Glue the toes to the closed side of the other two bags- the bottom. If you get this backwards, it’s no biggie.

5. Now create the texture, or skin- straight hair, curly hair, reptile scales, feathers, or fish scales. Cut paper has so many possibilities! This step could easily be done with markers or crayons instead or in addition. I did the curly hair by making fringe, then curling it with my pencil.

6. Glue the texture to the bag. You may want to allow a little glue-drying time here. If your little one tends to go to town on the glue, you can tell them “Just a dot, not a lot;” my students love repeating this.

7. Here’s the grownup part- open the decorated bag, and slide the stuffed bag inside of it. This makes a closed form. Staple the back and sides together so it won’t fall out. Now, cut the hole for the foot to go in. It needs to poke through both bags. You may have to do a bit of controlled jabbing to get though both layers!

8. Once you do all this stuff to both feet you are done! They wear like giant slippers. Enjoy!

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